Is Elon Musk Right Or Wrong To Dismiss Hydrogen Use For Low-Carbon Energy Storage?

Is Elon Musk Right Or Wrong To Dismiss Hydrogen Use For Low-Carbon Energy Storage?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk gestures as he arrives at the Axel Springer Awards ceremony, in Berlin, on ... [+] December 1, 2020. The context is transitioning from fossil energy to renewables. One key aspect of this is transport via gasoline or diesel vehicles and its transition to electric motors driven by batteries or hydrogen. The fossil fuel industry should be concerned about the efficiency and cost of sustainable transport, because that will determine the speed of the transition which will likely affect the decline of oil production and perhaps the oil and gas industry itself. Elon Musk knows batteries. He builds them: to propel cars and trucks, at one bookend, to grid-scale behemoths that store and stabilize electrical power for hundreds of homes and commercial enterprises, at the other bookend. Last week, May 12, 2022, Musk said hydrogen "is the most dumb thing I could possibly imagine for energy storage." This is not the first time, as Musk has made similar negative comments in past years. A few years ago, Musk told reporters that hydrogen fuel cells were "extremely silly." The dumb hydrogen storage comment was a sweeping statement. Was Musk referring to grid-scale storage of electricity? Or to storage